Places of Worship in Bangalore - Jews and The Chabad

Jews and The Chabad

The Jewish presence in Bangalore has been traced to a house dating to at least the early 20th century, called the Ruben House, on the main Old Guard road near Safina Plaza, where a mezuzah is displayed (a small case containing the Shema, a passage from the Bible handwritten on a piece of parchment, that expresses the basic precept of Jewish faith). It belongs to the Rubin Moses family, the only family out of the five families traced to pre–independence time who still live in Bangalore; the other four families have migrated. Ezer Weizman, the former president of Israel (from 1993–2000) visited this family in Bangalore in 1997 and reminisced of the old times when he had served in Bangalore during World War II in the British Royal Air Force. Apart from the Ruben house, two other Jewish homes traced in Bangalore are the Hazelmore house on the Palace road and the Eastern Lodge in the Cavalry road. Another piece of interesting information reported is that M.Benjamin author of the book The Mysteries of Israel's Ten Lost Tribes and the Legend of Jews in India is residing in Bangalore since 2001.

A cemetery on Mysore Road, also established at the beginning of the 20th century, by Subedar Nowgaokar, a Bene Israel Jew, at a site donated to him by the Maharaja of Mysore, is also a witness to the Jewish history in Bangalore.

In another part of the city in the European cemetery located on Hosur Road, two Jewish graves have been identified in the European Cemetery, one is of T M. Horvitz, (b. Australia in Runoleff, d. Bangalore on 20 June 1898 with a headstone of granite stone, engraved in Hebrew language and the other is of Rose Hickey (d. on 9 February 1917, aged 48 years).

As of 2012, the Jewish community (mostly belonging to the Information Technology (IT) sector) living and visiting Bangalore, though a small group, has established a Chabad in Bangalore, as proposed by two visiting rabbinical students who had been traveling in different parts of India to be in contact with the Jews. The rabbis are members of a global organization called Chabad Lubavitch located in New York with representatives across the world. The Rabbi students are traveling across India equipped with religious paraphernalia such as Tefillin and Mezuzot to preach to the small community of Jews.